Emerging China: US tries taming the dragon
Americans’ fear of China right now is palpable. We see danger in its products, in its vast reserves of our currency, in its growing military might, in its ravenous hunger for raw materials, and in its single-party state. With “Made in China” seemingly stamped on the bottom of everything we bring into our already overstuffed houses, we worry that China will soon buy and sell us, just like Japan seemed poised to do two decades ago. In short, we Americans no longer feel on top of the global economy. It’s finally somebody else’s [“pax” – or age of rising, and inevitable dominance].
Roughly a century ago, that’s exactly how the British felt about America. The United States was the “rising China” of that age, catching up to and, in many categories, surpassing its model, Great Britain. And just as today’s Americans feel that they use Chinese products to the exclusion of all else now, the same sentiment was prevalent among the British regarding American goods at the beginning of the 20th century. Consider this account from Edmund Morris’s prize-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore Rex”:
Current advertisements in British magazines gave the impression that the typical Englishman woke to the ring of an Ingersoll alarm, shaved with a Gillette razor, combed his hair with Vaseline tonic, buttoned his Arrow shirt, hurried downstairs for Quaker Oats, California figs, and Maxwell House coffee, commuted in a Westinghouse tram (body by Fisher), rose to his office in an Otis elevator, and worked all day with his Waterman pen under the efficient glare of Edison light bulbs.
Just like China today markets tequila to Mexico, back then America was managing the equally inconceivable, “coal-to-Newcastle” feat of exporting beer to Germany! At the time, America could consume only a fraction of what it produced, meaning the rest had to be exported. The result was a trade surplus and an inflow of foreign direct investment that left Wall Street awash in capital — much the way Shanghai’s stock market finds itself so popular among international investors today.
Americans today fear that China, with its $2 trillion US currency reserve, could buy our economy outright. Back then, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie calculated that America could buy the entire United Kingdom and pay off its national debt in the process! What the world’s economies feared most back then was the all-powerful “American price,” much as so many U.S. manufacturers today fear the seemingly bottomless “China price.” How did we achieve that price? We polluted our country at will, abused our labor in every manner possible, and shortchanged our public health at every turn. Consider these hidden costs:
– The average baby born in turn-of-the-century industrial Chicago had a 1:2 chance of reaching age five.
– After the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire, in which 146 sweat shop workers perished, New York State passed one of the pivotal bills in America’s urban reform movement, limiting working hours to 54 hours per week — for children!
– In the latter decades of the 19th century, American household income inequality was at its highest point in our nation’s history.
Minxin Pei, a fellow political scientist, likes to say, “Dictatorships are good at concealing the problems they create, while democracy is good at advertising its defects.” Thus the populism that raged across rising America in the 1870s and 1880s birthed the progressive era that defined the following several decades. Our nation was blessed to have reformers like Teddy Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, Jacob Riis, Margaret Sanger, Robert La Follette and Jane Addams rise up across our political landscape and successfully tame our exceedingly rapacious style of capitalism. Without their efforts and the resulting new rules, our union would have once again come apart at the seams. That difficult and tumultuous journey is worth remembering as we contemplate China’s stunningly similar trajectory today …
Read more here.
Source: World Politics Review, Thomas P.M. Barnett; Photo: Jakarta Post
